THE MOST FAMOUS CULTURAL HISTORIAN OF THE 20TH CENTURY IS 103 AND LIVES IN SAN ANTONIO. HE HAS CLEAR MEMORIES OF THE FIRST WAR IN FRANCE AND HIS ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1920 WHERE HE REMEMBERED THAT SPAGHETTI WAS THE BIG NEW FOOD. HE BUILT HIS LIBRARY BY BUYING GOOD HARD COVER BOOKS AT THE DRUG STORE FOR 25 CENTS.
Jacques Barzun Interview
April 14, 2009
JACQUES BARZUN: I was born in France November 30, 1907. My recollection of my early years up to 1914, were of complete happiness. Not only was I in a happy family, but my father and mother were at the head, in a sense, of the movement in all the arts, which were new. There was the Cubist moment. And to the house every Saturday at three o’clock, came a crowd of French and foreign young men, who were determined to make all the arts new. And so there was music, there was argument about theory. My father in the group was the theoretician of the new. And I did not, of course, understand to the full what they were talking about. But I imbibed the atmosphere and it stayed with me.
As I said, perfect happiness. I was allowed to circulate among the group. That’s how I came to sit on the lap of Guillaume Apollinaire who taught me how to read a watch. And there were others there. As I think I mentioned, foreign too, because word got around all over Europe that at our house one would meet the makers of the new art.
And, of course, 1914 blotted all this out in a moment and I remember vividly the apprehension of August 4 and 5, which were the days when war threatened but was not declared and there seemed to be a chance to avert it. So I’ve been a modernist ever since, and I’ve had my formula of cheerful pessimism as a result ever since. There’s no persuading me that from 1914 or, let’s say, during the period of the war in 1914 and ’18, began the decline of our civilization. Everything since then has persuaded me that we have lost our grip. What we see is not democracy, though we call it democratization, but it’s something else, which is decadence.
My father was in the first war. He’d been trained as a lawyer and apparently they were short of people to man military courts. So he was pulled out of the trenches shortly before some terrible disaster, which killed hundreds, and was made part of the military court in Paris. There were three of them and a senior citizen, and they had to see the poor devils who had disobeyed orders or tried to escape service.
During the War, I must’ve been between 9 and 10 and my parents noticed a strange outlook and behavior and they found that I had taken from the shelf a translation of Hamlet. Why I went to Hamlet I don’t know. But anyway, I read it and it was very gloomy, and I began to talk of suicide and they said why? And I said, “Well, so-and-so who I knew is gone and has been killed, and so-and-so, and so-and-so
So I began to talk of suicide. They took me right out of the Lycee and sent me to the seashore with my mother to St Enogat, That’s on the northern coast – not quite in Brittany, Normandy – not far from St Malo. I was told to play with the children on the beach. Well, the children on the beach were very young or they wouldn’t have been out of school the way I was. So I scorned that and gave some trouble for a while, again, with a suicidal notion, saying it was a useless ploy – a bad ploy to take me away from one place, wherever I went I would commit suicide. . It was the repeated deaths among those who I had known as older friends.
More than one in three, was affected by the war, either an injured person or a death. And the number of weeping women whom I saw and who contributed, I suppose, to my distress . It was perfectly awful. My mother had a friendship with a family in which there were three sisters and they were all stricken. And when my mother took me over to visit them, it was a weeping session. I don’t know why they brought up their lost ones. I don’t remember the exact details. But I remember they were sitting around drinking tea and weeping. And so I really didn’t want to live in that kind of society, hence, the idea of suicide. The beach did bring me back to something like normal. They were very understanding at the Lycee. They said, “We’ll take him back even though he’s left at a time when one doesn’t leave.”
In part of the yard that we played in the Lycee – one part of it was set off and there were wounded there, maybe six beds. And we were allowed to cross the line and talk to any that wanted to talk to us. And some talked horrible things. It wasn’t a good idea.
We had to go into the cellar to avoid the bombardments toward the end of the war. And before that, there would be an alert and we had to go to the cellar because there were German planes over Paris. So at the Lycee for some reason, I was perhaps 9 or 10, I was put in charge of a small group of younger ones to usher them into the cellar and see that they didn’t play hijinks and misbehave. And my parents were a little alarmed, but anyway they didn’t like the idea, making me responsible. And the answer was “He can make them responsible because he’s one of them.”
After the war many of the intelligent American soldiers who had the means stayed over until the Depression of 1922 in France. And with the dollar worth a great many francs, they stayed over there and they learned what European civilization was. It changed America from a sort of half-baked state, half colony through young men who had had two years of France or Germany, and some Italy, quite a few in Germany because their ancestors were Germans. But most were in Paris learning about good food, certain manners, the beauty of the city.
After the war, my father took a good look at the French universities, that is to say either Paris or Grenoble, which was the family seat, really – my father was in Paris only because of his position in the diplomatic service. He said to me the French universities have been decimated because we’ve been foolish enough not to exempt from the draft our best intellects, something which was avoided in the Second World War. And he said, as I look at the roster of the university, either of Paris or Grenoble, the people teaching are youngsters of no experience, no particular scholarship, just fillers-in. And so he said Oxford or Columbia. Columbia was the only American university known in Europe, thanks to Nicholas Murray Butler, who had gone over every year and indoctrinated all the European heads of state and intellectual elites with the idea that Columbia was it. And I didn’t really choose between Oxford and Columbia – I chose Columbia because I thought I would see Indians. But I saw nary a one!
I arrived in New York in 1920. And I found that my Lycee education had gone beyond what college was here in some respects and was behind in others. I took the examination, because in those days one had to take an exam to get into Columbia College, and there were some questions I couldn’t deal with, such as geometry. Not because I hadn’t had two years of geometry but because the terminology was altogether different. That hadn’t been taken into account. So I did six months of tutoring because obviously I needed a tutor who spoke French and English interchangeably about geometry. So that was that. And for the rest I did pretty well on the exam.
We were living in New Rochelle at that time as there was a French community there. There was the College of New Rochelle and there was a man there who was not only bilingual, he spoke I don’t know how many different languages. He was very pleasant, very nice. I had learned English in England, staying with friends of my family there for six months. And they had a very sensible idea. They said, “We can talk French but we’re not going to do it.”
I spent a semester, almost six months with the English family who were friends of my father had many contacts with England, made friends there, and the families visited. And they said, “Let him come to us for a few months and he’ll come out speaking English.” Well, of course, when I arrived in New York, I had an English accent fit to be cut with a knife, and I had to relearn American, which wasn’t so frightful. [CHUCKLES]
I could enumerate all sorts of things that were quite new when I came over here in 1920. I remember distinctly when I first came here – and what was sort of made much of by the ladies of the family we stayed with. They would say, “Well, now, in France, in Paris, have they got the telephone? Have they got this? Have they got that?” They just didn’t know to what extent Europe had mechanical amenities.
I think you might be interested in a couple of things, namely, what New York was like when I first came. Well, I can give you a couple of indicative things. I remember that spaghetti was an exotic dish. And then later on, not much later on, there were great big billboards saying, come here or go there – spaghetti and meatballs…on a billboard, $1 or whatever the price was at that time.
Another thing was that men wearing a wristwatch were considered sissies. That changed when the men who had been in the Army came back, because they all wore wristwatches. But as I said before many didn’t come back in 1918, but stayed over there for at least two years. First, because the dollar was very powerful… and living in Paris was both blissful and cheap. When they came back wearing wristwatches, which had become familiar, even necessary in the trenches, then slowly native Americans began to wear wristwatches. Another thing is hats. Men always wore hats. There was a famous businessman who was interviewed as he landed back from a trip to Europe and he was asked what the great movements were that he was apprehensive about. He said, “Communism and hatlessness!”
This is a very strange thing, isn’t it, to have given up hats altogether? I remember hats on the streets. Certainly when I first came, everybody wore a hat. I wore a hat in college. What would you do if you met a lady of your acquaintance or of your family’s acquaintance? You must raise your hat.
My mother was here the first year to see me into college safely. And then she said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve can’t stay.” She was asthmatic and the excessive heat also made her completely debilitated. And her doctor recommended her going back. So she did and kept house for my father and me when we were there. My father came to New York often as he had many friends here. My father just came back and forth, so they gave up the house in New Rochelle.
I lived in the dormitory at Columbia. I went from Hartley Hall to John Jay, which was newly built. I had a single room. In those days, all the dormitories – Hartley, Livingston and then ultimately John Jay were very Spartan, small room, one towel, a little wash basin, a little narrow bookcase. It’s been humanized a great deal since then. They made little suites so you could have a roommate. In my time, if one wanted a roommate, one was given just a bigger room but just as uncomfortable as you can imagine. Of course we heard that Harvard was even worse because nobody came to clean the rooms and they had been let go – they were never renovated. So that people had windows with a crack in the glass and all sorts of horrid things. So we thought at Columbia we were in the lap of luxury, when actually we were nowhere near what was done in subsequent time to make college experience humanistic.
In the summers sometimes I went to Europe for 2-½, 3 weeks. I also did a good deal of translating. There was a woman on campus, Miss Wegenar, lovely woman who was in charge of getting requests for a student to work at something or other. And she had me down for translating from French and German. And I went down once a week to Life magazine and went over all their captions for conciseness and accuracy.
One time I went camping with my friend, Dwight Miner. I kept in touch with him until his death. He was a classmate and my best friend. One summer Dwight and I went camping together along the Raquette River, in the Adirondacks. We had a wonderful time. One night we were waked up by some small but unusual noise. It was a horse that was munching at our box of cereal. [CHUCKLES] And we had a lovely time in the Raquette River, but Raquette Lake, which we needed to cross in order to get to the river, which emptied into the lake, we had a very rough time in a canoe. And it was characteristic – I think Dwight was in front of me, and he turned around and he laughed. He said, “Ha, ha, ha!” because he thought it was very funny that we were going to drown.
So the summers, Europe, camping with Dwight, and of course many of these things didn’t take the whole summer. I took a summer course once to get ahead of the game. I graduated in three years thanks to this extra summer, which gave me the three points or whatever was necessary.
Other work I had… Well, for the sake of the football team, I tutored Hans Schtoomp. Poor devil, was not meant to be in college at all. He was as nice as pie, but no matter what I did, no use. I had another tutoree, who was a little more amenable to improvement but very languid and very sweet. He would look at me with compassionate eyes, which said, “You’re trying hard and I’m trying hard but we’ll never get it anyway.”
I graduated from the college in’27. And then I was three years in graduate school. It took me four years to do my dissertation. So I got my Ph.D. in ’31.
In ’31, things broke loose. It was the onset of the Marxist era and people became intolerable, preaching Marxism or fighting it, or unsuccessfully trying to fight it.
The campus became intolerable because the Marxists had cells and each cell would have the task of making one, two or three new recruits. So one was assailed over and over again in the name of theory and – oh, it was intolerable, very bad.
I don’t remember the political accompaniments.
I do remember the Depression, when drugstores began selling good substantial books for 27 cents, good books. I made quite a bit of my library at the time through drugstore book sales. And, of course, food was very cheap.
I was living on Morningside Heights. This would’ve been – well, the early 30’s One notable thing, so I wasn’t as badly hit, Butler announced that the salaries of young instructors, if married, would not be reduced! So the $300 a month continued, I think, for 11 years, $3600 salary for a starting teacher. I moved to the Eastside quite a bit later, after the Second War. But before that I had first a bachelor apartment, then I got married and we got a little bigger apartment on 114th on the far side of Broadway. The apartment was on the ground floor of the building on the Southwest corner.
I couldn’t tell you what the rent was but it was very modest. That’s what enabled me to get married, I think – the fact that the rent would be no different whether or not we had two big rooms, a kitchen, and another little cubbyhole where we had breakfast.
We could live quite well on $3600, when a meal at Child’s Restaurant was in the nature of 50-60 cents. At that time the Gold Rail was the place to go. It was a great place on 111th and Broadway. You know the type of menu they had – this size (HOLDING HIS HANDS WIDE AND HIGH) Well, it was one of those places, and there were some scattered through the city, and particularly quite a few down at the tip of Manhattan, where apparently they were prepared to serve you any dish on a menu this tall, consisting of just two pages of very thin card, and very small, blue lines with the very low price attached. And there was a story that a man fell overboard from one of the tugs on the Hudson, and was eight hours in the water, finally rescued and dried out, and they said, “Aren’t you hungry?” He said, “Yes.” So they took him to one of the Gold Rail Restaurants, gave him this huge menu and said, “What do you want?” And he looked and he said, “I want everything above and below baked beans.”
The Blue Plate Special was something else. There was such a thing at Child’s. And it was served not on a table, but on a wide arm of a chair. And a blue plate was divided into sections, a fairly big one for the main, one for the side vegetable, and perhaps the other for dessert.
There was an Automat at Broadway and 113th or somewhere, quite nearby. And the Blue Plate Special had special names. And I remember a cartoon in Jester depicting our local Blue Plate thing for a man and his wife. And she says to him “What’s the use of ordering their sizzling steak when you left your hearing aid at home?”
During those years Nicholas Murray Butler was the President of the University.
I wouldn’t say I got to know him well, but I had a good many meetings with him over all sorts of things, even as an undergraduate. He always took a great interest in the undergraduates. He would come for the Yule log celebration and talk to us very nicely. And I remember one piece of advice, after I’d been to see him two or three times over various matters, he said, when I was a graduate student, “I can see that you’re going to have a career in scholarship and let me give you a really valuable piece of advice. You’ll be seated at banquets, asked to speak to groups at banquets, banquets will be in your life. Never eat the chicken and peas.”
Butler was a good golfer. Somebody took a picture of him in plus fours with his behind in front of the picture, and of course you don’t see his hands or anything like that. And it was printed in Jester with the caption, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.”
Butler was very much annoyed at that photograph. And I think he was right.
I believe he retired in ’45. He did nothing of what he should’ve done the last two years. He had completely given up distributing the money as it should be distributed among the schools, and the poor Department of Music had to buy their own postage stamps, whereas those departments that had fighting heads would go to the committee and bull their way through with their pockets full of money. That’s one of the things I had to do – to redistribute the money according to numbers of students, numbers of professors… That was my job I mean, as provost
Some departments had a paid secretary; others had to draft one of the professors as a secretary; some departments shared a secretary, which was very bad. Oh, it was all in disarray. I have a copy somewhere of what I did. I should say we because I took the precaution to have the vice president and the head of the Physics Department, Polycarp Kusch for all the sciences, and a roaming person I hired to go around and tell us what was going on, what people wanted, and so on. So that the reconstruction was done not in the abstract, but in the knowledge of what was awry and what should be let alone. In other words, it was done in an administrative way.
After Butler there was an interim president, that nice man from Pennsylvania, Frankenthaler, I guess he was secretary of the university. Anyway, he was just a figurehead. And then they got Grayson Kirk, who…
PK: didn’t Eisenhower succeed Butler?
JACQUES BARZUN: That’s right, you’re right, Eisenhower was elected President after Butler. But the reason I failed on that question was that Eisenhower was invisible and said that he didn’t understand what his role was. They said, “Well, the university will be run by the vice president, don’t worry, but do raise money.” He said, “I will not raise money for anybody!” In fact, he was put in by the chairman of the board of trustees, Thomas Watson, to prepare him for national presidency. Watson told me, “I put him in there to make him eligible for the presidency because the country will not elect a mere soldier as president. He must have some kind of non-military experience, preferably running a great institution like Columbia.”
Well, he didn’t run it at all. He gave to the graduating class of one of his years a little speech in front of Hamilton Hall. a very nice little speech. He said, “At West Point I was the first only in one thing and that was horsemanship,” which was not true. We had, during his presidency, a dinner meeting of the History Department, which was a monthly affair. And we invited Eisenhower to come and talk to us, which he did. And he said, “I’m not going to make a speech or answer questions about my career. I want to be just one of you people, meeting with you.” But what happened was that somebody spoke about the invasion of Europe, the Second World War, saying it shouldn’t have been done, not at the great cost and loss of life across the channel, but around the Mediterranean and into the soft underbelly of Europe.”
He blew up. “Soft underbelly?” And he began reciting the history of the military operations from ancient Greece to the present time– in the soft underbelly of Europe. He said, “That’s absolutely the worst place you could go.” He said, “Now, if you go to Italy – though it probably would be a tolerable place to have a second invasion, because Italy has only a backbone of mountains, but the rest to the east is just – it’s almost a chain of mountains.” And we were all impressed that he, who had only horsemanship at West Point, had somewhere got the whole history of Southeastern Europe.
PK: Let’s move onto a subject we haven’t covered and that is the war years during the Second War. I read two things recently. One was that you wrote a manual for the Navy. And you might tell me what the war years were like, what you were doing and so forth. The other thing is a reference that you made in, I believe, it’s in Dawn to Decadence but I’m not sure, about Samuel Eliot Morison. I think it had to do with Columbus. I think he was in the Naval War College in the Second War in Washington. Did you know him at all?
JACQUES BARZUN: Oh, yes, I knew him quite well. He made himself a specialist scholar in Naval matters and began to believe that he was a vice admiral or something, a very nice fellow and a wonderful scholar and conversationalist. And he wrote the monumental history of the Navy. He started with a little volume I think, and then went on to write the big History of United States Naval Operations.
The reason I wrote the Naval manual is interesting. There was a so-called V12 program for college students, which combined the college curriculum with certain things that were required to become a Naval officer. And at that time, I think I was chairman of the committee on instruction at Columbia College. At any rate, I got a very courteous letter from The Naval Academy, could I give them some advice for the V12 program? So I went down to Annapolis, and they said, “We need a book, a single book, not too long, which will give our officers knowledge of Naval warfare from the beginning of time. And we have these thick books which argue cases, points of view, and so on – not suitable at all. We want one short book. So, we tried to make a start at such a thing and here’s as far as we got.” And they gave me an envelope, on the back of which had been written the Phoenicians, the American War of Independence. So I said, “What about an outline of a book?” They said, “That’s a wonderful idea.” So I got three of my colleague instructors at Columbia and I said, “We’re going to dig out all the facts. I will put them together in proper order in an outline.” And that’s how An Introduction to Naval History came to be. And I’m rather proud of that job. It took us actually 28 days. the four of us, to write this outline. And nobody’s found an error in it.
The war years were very disruptive to Columbia, but it was after the war that a lot of the veterans came back and gave Columbia a sort of mature atmosphere that was very, very good.
PK: After the Second War you moved to the East Side.
JACQUES BARZUN: Yes. when I moved east, at that time I loved to walk, I decided that I would walk diagonally across Central Park and then a little bit along 110th Street, Cathedral Parkway, and be on time for an 8:30 or 9:00 class. Well, I hadn’t done it twice before a mounted policeman ambled over toward me and said, “May I ask what you’re doing in the park?” I told him. He said, “Well, I don’t recommend it. It just isn’t safe.” And that reminded me of my first experience of New York, when I was about 12 or 13. I decided to take a walk in the park and I was set upon by a gang of roughs and left pretty badly knocked about. And as I was leaping out of the park, another mounted policeman had said, “What brought you here?” He could tell, I suppose, from the way I was dressed that I wasn’t one of the gang. And he gave me the same advice. But I thought it had been pacified later on when I wanted to go diagonally to my classes.
We were living at 1170 5th Avenue, which had become something of a famous building because so many people of note had lived there for a number of years before going to Washington or ambassadorships abroad and so on. It was a co-op. I can tell you interesting figures. I bought the co-op for $4,000. I sold it – I can’t count the number of years later, for $800,000.
We moved to the Eastside, because we found that our friends lived mostly on the Eastside and disliked coming up to the Westside because transportation was so bad. You know what it was – it was only one bus line and not a very frequent service. It all comes back to me. You see, for the last two years – I should say, first, my memory has got big holes in it; and in the second place, I find I don’t think back when I’m just sitting and reminiscing to myself to that period in my life. I go back much, much farther back, which I think is a normal experience.
PK: One of the things that we should talk about is baseball. Was your most famous quote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game”
JACQUES BARZUN: It certainly is if you can go by the number of repetitions, I thought the rules of the game rather complex – were typical of the American mind, because it combined a great deal of strenuous activity with the necessity for having a good head and knowing what to do next. It may be so to a very slight extent in football or in soccer, but those two games seem to me limited to a few strategies for bodily conflict. Whereas baseball is infinitely more… civilized and complex, and visually much clearer.
I went to baseball games when I was in college and even before, and I have ever thought since, that the swapping of players has taken a great emotional resource from the American people. I suppose they still root for their team, but their team can become overnight a bunch of strangers. I followed the results of the games in the newspapers. Oh, yes, all the statistics were alive. [CHUCKLES]
College baseball games were played on South Field. That was before Butler Hall was built in the 20s. I remember in the Columbia Jester, it conked out in my time, but it had one marvelous cartoon of two sailors sort of leaning against each other and looking at the electric sign on top of then new Butler Hall. And what they saw was “Butterball.” And the caption was “Join the Navy and see the world the way we do.” And I remember the donkey and the man who had the task of cutting the grass for athletic purposes
PK: The other thing we were talking about that would be of interest related was the transportation in those days and the subways and the bus system. You mentioned that the bus that went up on Fifth Avenue I guess crossed at 110th, but that was a slow bus. Most of the avenues were two ways.
JACQUES BARZUN: Yes, and there were streetcars on some of the avenues. I remember on the Columbia campus, 301 Fayerweather, a big lecture room, which held over 100 seats – very unusual for Columbia undergraduates. And outside the window was a rather steep slope with the streetcar going there. And the lecturer invariably stopped for two minutes while the streetcar made the slope, because it made such a screeching noise.
PK: One of the things that we haven’t discussed yet is your interest in music and entertainment.
JACQUES BARZUN: My family on the maternal side were all music bound. My grandfather played several brass instruments and belonged to, a chamber music group. So did my father, who played the flute very well indeed, and started me when I was very young on a flageolet. And then I began to have lessons with Blanca, the first flute of the Paris Opera, and I became very good on the flute. But when I got to college and had to not only study but earn money, I found I couldn’t practice and I became so bad that I gave up the flute. And I regret it, because it’s an instrument I like very much, and I was quite good.
I was taken to the concerts given Saturday afternoon by a group from the Paris Symphony for the young. And I was barely three-years old when I became a regular attendant. And then I was taken to the opera. My first opera was Maeterlinck’s Bluebird and then Carmen absolutely raised me out of my seat. I’d never heard such wonderful stuff.
And there was a great deal of music at home. My mother played the piano pretty well, and there was a chamber music group that met – not regularly but often enough to make me feel at home in music. Then I learned to read and I became interested in various composers. Peer Gynt Suite I thought was a wonderful piece, and as I say, Carmen. As far back as my memory goes, I always had some music being played.
While writing my dissertation, every Friday afternoon I went to the Philharmonic, where I was seen there by the wife of the head of the department and I got a warning from – not direct from the head, but through the head of the college department – because we had two heads. We had the head of the whole department and the head of the college group. And the head of the college group, Harry Carmen said I have a message for you from Professor Ashley Thorndike…And that concerns your going Friday afternoons to concerts. When you’re writing your dissertation on the way to becoming a scholar, you must put away childish things. The Philharmonic was it Carnegie Hall at that time. The academics at Columbia considered listening to classical music a childish thing, but I didn’t give it up.
PK: How you became interested in Berlioz .
JACQUES BARZUN: Well, I mentioned to you before that as a child I was taken to Saturday afternoon concerts. And I believe that the conductor was a man named Edouard Colonne, If not, it was his right-hand man. And whichever it was, was quite keen about the music of Berlioz and played extracts, whole movements – they didn’t want to swamp the poor kids who were there. And I found Berlioz immediately congenial. And when I became aware of things in a different way, we got to not only seek out all possible performances, but to look at the scores. And I saw that he was an amazing innovator
I had a two-year fellowship from the ACLS in ’31-’32. American Council of Learned Societies. I determined to do a piece of scholarship as required by the grant, and at the same time to feed my interest in Berlioz, who had been very popular in Germany. I had many contacts, and indeed I found letters, programs, all sorts of things. I was able to save them and they’re at the Columbia library, while all the while studying his methods. He’s one of the greatest melodists, he’s an inventor of incredible rhythms, his harmony was foretelling – practically a century ahead of methods that have become ordinary. Not ordinary in the bad sense, but usual now. In a word, I satisfied myself that he was not only a very great composer but one of the most amazing inventors who ever lived. So that he seems to me, on evidence that I could produce, to be not only in the class with Bach and Beethoven, but in some ways to outdo in number the contributions that he made. He wasn’t popular. People say and I suppose it’s true, that I put him back on the map. No, he was considered ignorant and blatant and all sorts of things. I remember a very musical woman in Boston, who invited me to one of the Friday afternoon concerts there to sit next to her. She looked at the program and said, “Oh, they’re playing that tedious ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ again. It’s the most simple-minded composition in the repertory.” And she said, “Take the Fifth Movement, ‘The March to the Scaffold,’ just that one line…” And I said, “One line? What do you make of the counterpoint that accompanies all the way through and is varied endlessly with the melody?” “Oh, is there?” “Well, listen.” “Oh, yes!”
People don’t listen, they don’t read, they don’t think.
PK: tell me about some of the course you took and what teachers you had when you were an undergraduate from 23-27. Did you take any courses in French?
JACQUES BARZUN: Yes, I took a course in 18th Century French literature taught by Professor Spires. The academic stars at that time were Raymond Wheeler… Then there was Harrison Ross Steves, English Department; Carlton Hayes in history – he was a national figure, having written a two-volume textbook. He was known the world over. I took a course in Latin with Moses Hadas.. And then I took Greek with him.
There was a science requirement and I had a very good first year physics man, whom I can hear in my mind’s ear. It was not Isadore Rabi who won the Nobel. We became good friends later on when I was on the faculty a very funny man. I even took geology.
We all looked down on the business school, but I learned to appreciate it when it was made over.
PK: Did you always think that you would have a career in academia?
JACQUES BARZUN: Yes, Harry Carmen , he was dean of the college, asked me what I was planning to do in life. And I said… “Well, I want to follow a family tradition and become a diplomat and I’ll enroll in the diplomatic service in Washington as soon as I’m eligible.” He said, “You have no idea what the diplomatic service in this country is. It’s surely not like your ancestors experienced. It’s a bunch of narrow-minded bureaucrats, who perhaps have a good command of foreign language. It’s not for you.” So I said, “What is for me?”
While I was getting my PhD we had been given a test. Not compulsory but one of those tests which are supposed to indicate talents in one direction. Well, I didn’t know whose test it was but I took it. I’ll give you three guesses what came out. The field in which I would shine…. Agriculture, some test. But Harry Carmen was the one that convinced me to go into academia.
When I was still an undergraduate I went out for Spectator, and at that time there was a very strict routine for making one’s way into Spectator as a reporter. There was a rulebook, which you had to memorize about certain words and spellings and punctuation. And at first, you had a very restricted area of reporting. But something happened – great senior men on Spectator were absent or unable to perform, and the news came that Harlan Fiske Stone had been nominated to the Supreme Court, and he must be interviewed before he left. And I was sent, raw, young and inexperienced, to interview him. And to my great relief and pleasure, he was extremely pleasant to me, and he was not condescending. He wasn’t being nice to the baby but he gave me a very full account of his career and wishes and plans. And I apparently asked him why – or what are the qualifications…? Anyway, I tried to get him to say, by some question, why they had chosen him for the Supreme Court. And he raised his hands and he said, “Man proposes and God disposes.” So I wrote a brilliant article about Stone for the Spectator. He was a member of the Supreme Court and later became Chief Justice.
I wrote theater criticism for three years. I did was what I consider brilliant, dramatic criticism for the column, “The Suburbs of Columbia.” I wrote one of the varsity shows. I think Spectator ran special articles on the varsity show. “The Suburbs of Columbia” was strictly downtown. It afforded me a great deal of pleasure – not only always having two tickets, seventh row on the aisle, like a regular.
I remember there was Franz Werfel with his great show – I don’t remember what it was. Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward. Thornton Wilder was at one of the little theatres way downtown. He was not on the Broadway circuit as yet.
Oh, and having two tickets was a great advantage with girls. And it was an experience handed from one critic to the next, that you might take a very nice girl of whom you were very fond. But if she was stupid about the play, you learned a valuable lesson. [CHUCKLES] If you took her out to dinner afterwards or before, you couldn’t get anything to drink unless you knew the right place to go.
52 Street was a row of speakeasies. And there were some at the very tip of Manhattan Island where there were Off-Broadway theatres that were very much attended, “The Garrick Gaieties,” all the way downtown. There was another theatre there. Excellent plays and what were then called revues, which were a series of skits, usually quite charming. That’s where that brilliant woman actress made her beginning, who became Lady Peel. She was so popular under her maiden name, Beatrice Lillie,
PK: Now, I’m going to move onto a more recent period and ask you – you were still with the university in the late 1960’s. That was a time of interest and turmoil. Was it the most tumultuous experience you had in academia?
JACQUES BARZUN: Oh, absolutely. Fortunately, I had said that I would be provost only for ten years. And what happened was that the Rockefellers wanted to give us $25 million, but they had a rule that with the gift went a committee of about five experts, who would examine every department. And it took two years for their review to take place. So I had to serve another two years, and I came to an end, thankfully, just one year ahead of the ’68 troubles. So I was no longer the provost. One incident of the examination of all our deans and schools and curricula – I was still provost. I got a phone call from the head of this search committee. A man named Armey, I think nasty little man. He said, “I notice an important discrepancy. In the catalogue of the college it says that Grayson Kirk is the 16th president; in the catalogue of the engineering school it says that he’s the 15th. Now, how do you account for that?” [CHUCKLES] It took me a minute and I said, “Well, in one place they count the acting president of such-and-such a year, and in another place they don’t.” [CHUCKLES] You had another question?
The disruption in ’68 was a disaster due to lack of leadership. Our president was Grayson Kirk, a delightful man, not a scholar, the kind of person who gets people to agree together by being rather wooly and vague. And trouble began when the assistant dean of the college Coleman was imprisoned in his office by the students for three days as it happened. And what I think would’ve been done and what I would’ve done had I still been provost, would’ve been to collect three or four deans and two or three professors and go down to the group of students affecting this imprisonment and say, “If you have a grievance we will listen to it in an orderly way in my office as early as you want tomorrow morning. But you have absolutely no right to imprison anybody. You have committed an illegal offense which could lead you to jail.” And I think that would have diffused the whole thing. That that was the way to handle that kind of thing.
What was interesting about those student demonstrations was that with them or after them came something like 2,500 letters from their parents taking various points of view. But many of them said, “We are law abiding citizens but we do feel that the student had a grievance that they weren’t properly attended to or taught or listened to. They report to me that office hours are not kept by the professors who list them on their door,” and so on and so forth. We divided the task of answering those 2,500 or 2,800 letters. But I learned a lesson there that the spirit of rebellion and complaint was in the air and should have been attended to, should’ve been dealt with, negotiated, talked over.
Andrew Cordier was brought in as an interim president , he talked the rebellion to a resolution but he did infinite harm to the university, which has not been cured since. Because what happened was that he would take anybody who was on the staff who happened to be in his office and delegated to him the task, so that when he was through, the university had no structure whatever. And that was one of my jobs and one of the jobs I’m particularly proud of – restructuring Columbia after it had been completely torn apart. Cordier had been a diplomat at The United Nations. He was a delightful man, but no administrator.
With Grayson Kirk, my impression was that he was scared. And then he and David Truman, who succeeded me as Provost, they’d been holed up in the president’s office, thought they could do things by sending out sheets of recommendations
PK: Is it an example, although earlier than the last 20 years – is it an example of the decadence that you refer to in your book?
JACQUES BARZUN: Yes. Later on I saw Kirk at a gathering that Bill Bloor put together. There was Bill Bloor, Kirk, a couple of trustees, I think we had dinner. And Kirk had been booted out for not handling the situation – when the conversation went back to those days he said, “I made a mistake. I came from the government department but I didn’t know how to govern.” It was very touching. He was not doddering. He was 90-years old or something like that, and he had come to terms with his own failure. He was such a nice man but a weak sister.
PK: One of the things we haven’t spoken about, and if I may ask you , you read the papers and you see the news and you see what’s happening in the American political system. And your book was published about ten years ago. What is your opinion of the media and communications and the move towards decadence, if that’s where it is, that you see in the last ten years?
JACQUES BARZUN: Well, the decline in newspaper subscriptions and the death of newspapers here and there, or their reduction in size of coverage, the substitution of TV for reading news – all that strikes me as decadence all right. I don’t think I would call it so much a danger as a devaluation of the intellectual element in democracy. It’s a democracy of the super market. Everybody equal, everybody tending to his own affairs; great ignorance about politics and all other things; world news or even local news and local attention to local problems, and a markedly lower level of intelligence – the kind of intelligence that is built up in school, because the school system is broken down. There’s no teaching, no discipline, people don’t know how to read or write, they have a calculator, which does for the third branch of learning. It’s drifting. And, fortunately, popularity still seems to attach to pretty good people, beginning with Obama. And Obama suggests also that through the same indifference, we have now become unprejudiced.
PK: When you arrived at Columbia in the 1920’s, if somebody had told you that at the beginning of the 21st Century there would be a black president, how would you have responded?
JACQUES BARZUN: I would’ve said, “Anything can happen, but not that.”
I’m depressed by the thought that now, six years of college is common as against four. That shows the slackness that I find elsewhere. I think that below a certain age speech has become very poor. Bad English, sloppy pronunciation, and of course all this text messaging or massaging or whatever it is, is childishness protracted. I think it’ll have to hit a lower bottom. A real bottom, so somebody will rise up and say, “Well, we’re a bunch of slobs and nitwits. Let’s get some energy going and follow me. Who wants to?” It’ll take a leader and he will have a following only after a rather longish period of nullity, of zero everything.
When I read about what the principals of schools are recommending for certain kinds of behavior or misbehavior, I wonder where they come from. Collective action on what ought to be an intellectual plane is very poor, it seems to me. Problems generate idiotic proposals of solutions, and when they’re chosen, and some are bound to be good, the implementation is slow or nonexistent. It’s very much what I encountered when I interviewed young men for the post of assistant provost. They all said if they got it “Of course I’ll be very glad to do the things that you enumerate but when will I be allowed to help make policy?” And I gave them one answer that surprised them. I said, “You make policy every time you take care of the little details for which I’m hiring you. That is policy.”
In the federal government it has to come from the top, but it also has to have those levels below, understanding that they are creating policy.
Obama is very intelligent. I wonder if he has the kind of intelligence that is needed. People, in general, now have lost a sense that they exist to make things go – not to stop things. And that’s what Congress is best at, to stop things. Don’t approve these judges, don’t do this, don’t do that. The only thing they do well are these – what do they call them? – their own…earmarks
It’s a comment on our society and where we are in our progress that Sarah Palin was nominated as a vice presidential candidate of the United States. I mean, it’s just… incredible.
There was an inquiring reporter here not long ago who wandered the streets and asked passersby some questions. And last July he stopped a woman and said, “We’re going to celebrate something on the Fourth of July. Tell me about it.” And she was completely nonplussed. She didn’t answer. So he started to move on. She said, “Oh, do tell me.” And he told her. She said, “Ah, yes. And, you know, I used to teach the damned thing.” I wonder what kind of…. social progress that is.
PK: On another subject I read that Fred Friendly, who was Executive Producer of the CBS News tried to persuade you and Lionel Trilling to put the Great Books Colloquium on television.
JACQUES BARZUN: That’s right. And we asked him what that entailed and he said, “Well, of course people will call up and ask questions or offer opinions.” And we said, “What do you think a seminar is?” It was an idiotic idea.
PK: May I ask you where you were when such important events as the death of Franklin Roosevelt or the bombing of Pearl Harbor occured?
JACQUES BARZUN: I was in a metro station at 116th Street. And a woman, a big blousy woman, rushed up to me. I was standing alone there. And said, “Your president has died.”
I was trying to remember about Pearl Harbor and it came back to me the other day. I was lecturing at Princeton. [PAUSE] It was a series of lectures. [PAUSE] And everybody had to be told – Pearl Harbor, where it was. Oh, it was a complete surprise to everybody. Because the place, the date all were unknown. There were no threats.
I remember the surprise that everybody felt after the war, when we went really to occupy Japan. And everybody had a couple of friends who were in this arm or that arm of the reinventing of Japan. And they all reported their humility and plasticity. And that was very hard to understand – how they had been such tough soldiers but obviously the two things are the same seen from different angles. They were plastic so they could be made into a… soldier, an army, and they went all the other way when we sent over men and women – some of the women were very nice, very able in some line of work here. But you’d never think of them as remaking a soldier into a decent person, but they did.
I had a young Japanese from the American Embassy in New York – he was a boy. He was quite young, perhaps 20 or 21 – to tutor in English, because his English was very rudimentary. Tatsua Sakuma. Awfully nice. And he brought me recordings of Japanese music. He told me a lot about the significance of myths and symbols, which he showed me were commonplace matters. For example, a large green fish swimming around means innocence. And I said, “Well, how do you work that into a conversation?” He said, “Well, you’re talking with a friend and you say about a girl, a green fish.” [CHUCKLES] And he says, “There’s a whole vocabulary of those things,” which I thought was very interesting. I was caught unprepared. I had been told by Americans who had been to Japan that when our sessions came to an end, whether he had had enough or was transferred, he would bring me a gift and I should have a gift for him. I messed up on that, and I’ve had remorse every since. He gave me some perfectly beautiful pearl cufflinks and I had nothing.
PK: Well, you gave him an education.
JACQUES BARZUN: Oh, I’d rather play the game properly. He had a lovely phrase, which I’ve remembered since. He was explaining to me something to the effect of always negotiate. He said, “It’s always best to creep around by diplomat.” It became a phrase in our family. Don’t antagonize so-and-so, creep around by diplomat.
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